Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/299

Rh surprised here, that so many tints and shades can be taken or formed from "the bridge of colours seven." This is the raw material that goes abroad, in every direction and to every distance, to be worked up in cathedral, church, chapel, and college, and other ornamental windows. Really the stock in store of this stained glass is so vast, that one might wonder why it should be sold by the square foot instead of the square rod. To estimate it by the foot seems almost like computing the national debt of Great Britain in.

The other is the department in which the working artistry of the establishment is carried on. This is its Royal Academy, where more paintings are produced and exhibited in a year than in the National Gallery in London. They are done on glass instead of canvas, but are none the less artistic for that. The Raphael or Michael Angelo of this great studio has a salon by himself, in which he develops into outline and shape his conceptions. Here he passes before his eye all that Adam saw and named, and more too—all things that bloom and breathe with sweet odours in Nature's realm: the flowers of every zone; the birds of every land and plumage; every beast from the elephant to the winged mouse; every fish from the whale to the minnow of the thinnest brook; human histories reaching back to the holiest hours of Eden; pictures and dreams of angels. These